The Effects of Inter-ethnic Conflicts on the Education of the African Girl Child: A Reading of Chinua Achebe's Girls at War

Abstract

Most countries in Africa are multi-ethnics. As it is in most civilizations in the world, different nationalities come together to form a geographical contiguity owning to such factors like proximity, migration, annexation and colonization among others. While some countries in the world have been able to manage the conflicts arising from their inter-ethnic relationships. The case is not so with African countries where inter-ethnic conflicts have been responsible for underdevelopment of many countries however, there is need to reverse this ugly trend. This study examines the impact of the recurrent inter-ethnic crisis on the education of the African girl-child. The study is based on the fictive world created by Chinua Achebe based on the Nigerian civil war fought between 1967-1971. The study used the fictive character of Gladys to explore the nature and the extent of the damage that inter-ethnic crisis could continue to have on the education of the African female children in particular by using psychoanalytic criticism as theoretical framework, by adopting the methods of "reading" employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret the text The paper concludes that although crises generally have negative impacts on the society, the effects of wars and conflicts on the girl child education may be irreversible, therefore, the need to protect girl-child from traumatic experience of war if their education is to be enhanced is the objective of this paper.